Upon finishing up my report and putting together my materials for the trade fair, I came to see how truly priceless the needs assessments I had conducted and gathered were to the core of my project. Due to the variability in responses from the various parties I talked with, I received such a wide range of possibilities in terms of what direction to take the project in even with restrictions on actually filming anything. Now that everything is said and done, I am happy with the outcome and the quality of what I was able to put together as the lone member of the group (with the support from my amazing peers who assisted me along the way).

The trade fair was a great wrap up to the project and the semester as a whole. It is always a rewarding experience to share your work with others who have been struggling alongside you on their own project. Seeing and hearing about what other people had been working on was quite crazy, as I had thought I had a basic idea down based on little talks here and there throughout the semester, but there were so many excellent curriculums that my peers had created that I was honestly a bit baffled (and jealous!) of the professionalism they demonstrated through their work. Getting the chance to talk about my project with peers also helped me to gather my ideas on the filming process (TBD) and I felt much more confident in the direction I had chosen to take my own project in.

The trade fair was also a bittersweet affair, as we had to watch so many people leave to pursue new chapters in their lives. Big shout out to all of those who won’t be around next semester; good luck with everything you pursue. You’ll all be missed! And to everyone sticking around for next semester, I’ll see you all soon.

Team Sonati decided to reflect on the design process immediately after the Curriculum Design Fair and post our fresh, unedited thoughts in audio form. Enjoy!

Catherine, Kelly, y Dean

For our group, the most beneficial part of this curriculum design project was the chance to apply what we were learning in our second semester classes (for example, Curriculum Design, Teaching of Reading, and Language Assessment) to a real life situation. We appreciated the opportunity to collaborate with another university, and it was rewarding to know that our final curriculum will benefit refugees and others in need.

We appreciated the challenge of including curricular elements that allow students to recycle and apply what they are learning in class. For example, the community service element affords students the opportunity to read to children in their new community.

Ben, Sally, and Willow

We felt that responsible curriculum design has to be informed by the environmental, social, economic conditions within which learning is situated. This perspective guided our needs analysis and framed the questions we posed.

One of the most  profound things we learned from conducting our needs analysis was that the term itself can mean different things to different people. In our case, examining “need” in a country where 59 percent of people live in poverty and close to 25 percent in extreme poverty had a very specific meaning to us. According to the United Nation’s World Food Project, three-quarters of Haitians live on less than US$2 per day. Half of the population earns less than US$1 per day. Many people don’t have ready access to electricity, water, sanitation, or healthcare (wfp.org). We felt that we were ethically and morally obliged to inquire about how these conditions might impact learning. At the same time we were being told that there was a genuine need for English, so we tried to find out exactly what that need was.

The needs analysis was in fact conclusive. It confirmed that curriculum was not successfully implemented because teachers lacked the training to do so. However, there were not enough consistent teachers to train. We found ourselves examining the data from our initial interview  about whether the basic needs of students were being met and how that impacted their learning. Teachers had reported that students were often sleepy after lunch because of the high saline content in the food and water. For some, lunch was their only meal of the day. We concluded that the initial interview revealed the following: 1. The lack of clean water negatively impacts learning. 2. Students need to learn English for future employment and communication with local and global NGOs. 3. The school wants to increase literacy in English. They want kids to read. We took these findings and built a curriculum around them. Water is the content and the point of relevant entry. English is the tool to build local and global partnerships. The students are the ones to do it. And so, we returned to our starting point. Curriculum design needs to be informed by the environmental, social, economic conditions within which learning is situated. Poverty impacts learning.

I was teaching at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York and I was actually teaching the Conversation Course. That course was for students who have completed five years of Chinese learning or have reached an advanced speaking level. At that time, the Chinese Conversation Course did not have a curriculum and I also could not find an appropriate textbook either. I simply asked students what they wanted to talk about and prepared lessons on those topics. However, although this class only happened twice a week, I felt that I needed to do a lot of preparation such as choosing proper reading materials and video clips, thinking about discussion questions and class activities, and etc. Therefore, with the opportunity of designing a curriculum, I would like to design the curriculum for the Saint Ann’s Conversation Course to help me better teach this class next year.

The Needs Assessment was extremely helpful for us to set course goals, choose discussion topics and decide class activities. Our Needs Assessment is composed of two parts – teacher interview and students survey. We contacted the head of the Chinese program at Saint Ann’s School, who is also the teacher of the current Chinese Conversation Course and scheduled for an interview. She asked us to send her a list of interview questions so that she could prepare, which made the interview very efficient – only lasted for 30 minutes. She told us that the goal of the Conversation Course was to create a relaxing environment where students could talk freely without pressure, aiming to improve students’ Chinese speaking skill in terms of fluency and accuracy. She said that she emphasizes teaching Chinese history, and she hopes that future teacher of the Chinese Conversation Class can bridge the old and the new aspects of China. These two points have become our primary design principles.

We created three version of student survey for three groups of students – future students, current students, and former students of the Saint Ann’s Chinese Conversation Class. We wanted to collect 10 respondents from each group, however, we were only able to collect 13 completed surveys, because there are only eight potential future students, only four students who are currently taking the Chinese Conversation class, and we could not reach to Saint Ann’s graduates who had taken the Chinese Conversation class before since their Saint Ann’s email accounts were automatically disabled after they graduated. That was a little bit disappointing, because we thought former students who had experienced the Chinese Conversation class could contribute a lot of their thoughts, but unfortunately we didn’t have input in that regard. In spite of that, the results of the student surveys were sufficient and interesting. We found that students prefer to talk about current and practical topics, tend to like the more relaxing activities, and are generally interested in improving their Chinese fluency. We would like to respect most of the students’ opinions, but we still might ask students to do some more demanding tasks, such as presentation, to let them out of their comfort zone (occasionally) and push them to practice their speaking.

I found the Needs Assessment very helpful and useful. I learned how to design thinking and ask questions by appreciative inquiries. Needs Assessment built a solid foundation for my curriculum design project.

Before participating in the curriculum design project, the process of designing a needs assessment was unfamiliar to me. I had worked with syllabus design and lesson planning in the past through a TESOL certificate program and international volunteer teaching experience, but had very limited experience in understanding how to systematically and effectively assess and incorporate student and teacher preferences and needs to fulfill project goals. An awareness that our needs assessment would be used to enact change within a community in need of additional support allowed me to more fully engage with the process and appreciate its usefulness.

The educational program we are working is situated in Nicaragua and operates under the philosophy of SONATI. The student population we are working with is comprised of adolescents who meet 2 hours every Saturday. In following with SONATI’s goals of “empowerment through conservation and free environmental education”, we sought to design an outline for a year long curriculum  that would incorporate English language learning through environmental awareness.

The process of creating our NA began with a skype interview conducted in Spanish with a administrator of the program. The purpose of this interview was to gather valuable information about the administration, students and class instructor that could be synthesized and analyzed to create survey questionnaires. Following the Needs Assessment Interview guidelines we had learned in class, we formulated interview questions for the administration that were categorically descriptive. These questions were designed to elicit details of the program and verification of information we had previously found through research. After greeting the administrator, we asked questions within the framework of a polite and relatively informal discourse.

The woman we interviewed demonstrated a genuine investment in these students and the ideals of the program.  Her visible determination to enact change and progress was additionally motivating for me as it reiterated the importance of sharing that same commitment as an active contributor to the educational progress of these students.

The information we received through this interview guided the creation of our questionnaires. We learned that there will be a new teacher teaching the class, the class will meet for two hours every Saturday, students possess a low proficiency level, and student and teachers have access to various technological resources within the classroom including projectors and computers.  Individual questionnaires were written for the students, the administration and the on-site volunteer teacher based on this information. Each of these three questionnaires was appropriately formatted for its corresponding audience. While the student questionnaires mostly targeted degrees of interest (playing games or working with animals), the administrative questionnaires addressed logistical concerns such as the duration of volunteer teacher experience for most teachers and how the philosophy of the SONATI program is typically implemented within the classroom.

The questionnaires were delivered via email and efficiently completed and returned for our analysis. The results of these questionnaires elaborated on our previous findings from the interview and offered us additional information that would prove critical for developing our curriculum. We learned that the new teacher is a non-native speaker of English who has never taught English before. She is interested in using games to advance learning of English through an environmental focus. We also learned that the students of the classroom come from a mix of exposure to English and a variety of proficiency levels. These students interests aligned with that of the teacher in respect to the desire to use games and projects to advance their learning. Responses to our question about why they want to learn English elicited broader social implications about their current social status and awareness of the broad sense of opportunity that is generally identified with the English language. These results further highlighted the importance of our involvement in this project.

Kelly, Catherine and I interpreted these findings to develop a curriculum that reflects the interests of community members and the overarching SONATI program within which their classes are framed.  Our year long CBI program is designed to combine English language instruction with environmental education through adequate consideration of student skill level and administrative concerns.

The NA serves as a fundamental tool for increasing learner motivation by reminding learners that educators are invested in their progress and want to address their needs and interests. The process of creating a needs assessment introduced me to the strategies through which successful teachers and administrators enact meaningful change in an educational program. Throughout the NA process I was continually reminded of our role as catalysts for this change. Change that may begin on a small scale has the potential to transform communities. I look forward to discovering how the following stages of our curriculum design project may lead to this feasible goal.   

Needs Assessment Reflection

The task of designing needs assessments for our curriculum design project was great learning experience for me. I had some practice creating needs assessments for the Language Teacher Education course, but was not able to pilot the assessments to see if the assessment design was successful in gathering the right kind of feedback. It was also motivating to create NAs that served a purpose of helping us to design a curriculum that would be useful to the program at SONATI.

We began the process of our NA by creating initial questions to ask through a Skype interview with one of the SONATI directors. We wanted to gather information that would help us create surveys that elicited detailed responses based on the initial interview. The interview was conducted in Spanish by Kelly and Dean. Since I don’t speak Spanish, I was a silent observer but was able to roughly follow what was being said. We used the information gathered during that interview to create three different surveys, one for the directors of the program, one for the volunteer teacher, and one for the students. We delivered the surveys via email and received feedback quickly. Receiving the feedback quickly was encouraging because it shows that SONATI is invested in this project and is excited to receive the final product.

Through the interview we gathered the following basic information about the course and the materials in the classroom:

• The classes will be two hours long on Saturdays
• There are 20 students between the ages of 12 and 16
• There is a new volunteer teacher who began teaching in March
  • They will be working on pronouns, colors, and general vocabulary and grammar
• The students might learn English in public school, but they have very low proficiencies
• Their classrooms have projectors, computers, a blackboard, and CD players.

From the administrator questionnaire, we received more information about the volunteer teachers who work for SONATI. Most of the Nicaraguan teachers serve for one year and the foreign teachers typically serve for three to six months. SONATI wants the curriculum to be broad and flexible enough to cover a one-year period, giving the teachers space to adapt the lessons to their own needs.

We found out that the volunteer teacher is a non-native speaker of English, but studied English for ten years, and practiced her English through traveling. She is not a trained teacher and has never taught English before. She is interested in teaching through environmental content and using games and projects to reinforce learning.

We received responses from eleven out of the twenty students who ranged in age from eleven to fifteen. There is a mix of the students’ exposure to English, but their levels are all beginner. They are interested in doing group work and learning English through studying nature. They are most interested in studying natural habitats and recycling. Some of the students responded that they are motivated to learn English because “it is very important for any future career”, “When I’m older I might need to work or study in English”, and “Because I like it a lot. I want to better myself, I want to be somebody in life, I want to be a translator”.

Based on our findings, we decided that we will create an environmentally focused flexible CBI program for classes that meet two hours a week on Saturdays for twelve months. We believe that SONATI will be pleased with the curriculum if it is aligned with the foundations mission to educate about the environment. There was some hesitation from one of the administrators about designing a content based curriculum for low level learners, but we hope we will be able to show that is possible to combine both English language instruction with environmental education at a level appropriate for the students.

Upon receiving the survey results and analyzing them, we realized we forgot to ask a few important demographic questions, like the name of the town where the new class is offered. We realized we should have asked someone outside of our group to review the surveys before sending it out. We might have received suggestions such as creating a likert-like scale on the student survey instead of having them just pick one answer. That way we would have gathered more information about students’ interests in topics to cover in the course.